The Rhys Muldoon Interview – Outtakes

I’ve been sitting with Rhys Muldoon in his House Husbands provided Melbourne home for thirty minutes now and I’ve felt at ease for over twenty-nine.

Within seconds of arriving here, 20 month old Maki ran straight for Rhys’s iPad and started swiping wildly at the screen and because I had the scent of celebrity in my nostrils – and was therefore a little excitable and jittery – I overreacted just a tad and snatched the iPad out of Maki’s talon-like, toddler-fingers. ‘No way,’ I said, as casual as possible. ‘You wreck everything you touch.’

And Watch Out For His Guest Vlog!

When Rhys laughed, pointed a finger at Maki and semi-yelled, ‘You don’t deserve nice things!’ he conjured Maki’s cheeky faux-shy smile and we become fast friends, if only for forty-five minutes.

After fifteen minutes of talking about football we moved on to fifteen about House Husbands and the differences between men and women and then all of a sudden we’re talking about all kinds of crazy shit and – although the Dictaphone is recording everything we say – the script has been forgotten; we are just two blokes chewing the cud.

‘Is Julia Morris really loud?’ I ask, as I followed Rhys out to the portico, Maki in arm.

‘Loud? No, not as loud as you’d think,’ he says, with a shrug.

‘Crazy as you think?’

‘No?’ he says, as if the possibility had never occurred to him.

‘When I say crazy I mean… energetic… like in her comedy shows,’ I say, backtracking.

‘She’s a good chick. I’d never met her before House Husbands. But, yeah, she’s just fun to be around… and no… not too loud or too crazy.’

I realise Maki has picked up one of Rhys’s tubes of paint and is sucking on it and so I take it away from him and put it in my back-pocket, calculating what I could get for it on eBay. ‘And what’s it like being on set around Firass Dirani’s hot body all day? Any feelings of inadequacy?’

Rhys shrugs again. ‘Not really, I just give him hand-jobs and stuff to keep him quiet.’

I can only laugh and be in awe at how compatible we are when it comes to humour.

‘Is that all it takes?’

‘Yeah, generally a hand-job or a milkshake works best.’

‘Fun times on set!’ I say. ‘I’ve got my 40th coming up this year and I was wondering what Firass’s bum would charge for appearance fees. I’m thinking of getting it along for the entertainment because it obviously worked for series one of House Husbands…’

‘But no,’ he says. ‘He’s a star. He’s going to be massive and you don’t meet true stars too often.’

And then it occurs to me.

‘Hey Rhys,’ I say, as I bring up a YouTube clip up on my iPhone and hand it to him. ‘I’ve been doing this series of video weblogs about how to cut the time you spend on housework. What do you think about appearing in one? Or maybe doing a guest vlog?’

He watches the footage of me cleaning a toilet for about a minute and a half and then lifts his vision. He has that light-bulb look. ‘Here’s how we’ll do it… ’ he says, staring me in the eye with all the intensity and spontaneity of an art-head.

Second later Rhys, Maki and myself are heading down the hall towards Rhys’s bedroom…

Full transcript of interviewhere.

Come back next week to Rhys Muldoon’s special guest ‘Housework Time-Saving vlog’ for the Reservoir Dad website.

About The Author

I fell into this blogging thing but now see it as that crucial cog in the machine. Blogging offers me a great creative outlet with an immediate audience. It freshens my perspective. Reliving my time with the boys, recording our last pregnancy and the birth of our fourth child and dancing around the intimate moments of my relationship with Reservoir Mum acts as a time capsule for my family, adds a little extra to my world, and reminds me of how good I’ve got it.

A hard day at the office becomes a learning experience in retrospect, a chance to colour the most difficult moments with a touch of the crazy, something to savour, something to reread later with the boys on my lap.